Vintage Sound Postcards from Poland

I came across an art opening at Devotion Gallery in NYC. I have never heard of Sound Postcards, or the contextual history that spawned them. I’m intrigued and I am going to try to attend.

Information I read on Facebook:

“During 60s and 70s communism in Poland, at a time when vinyl records [were] hard to get, sounds postcards became extremely popular. They looked like standard postcards on the back, but on the front an analogue recording was engraved in a thin layer of laminate. Sound postcards were usually made by tiny firms, and the recording quality was low, but very often they represented the only available possibility of having access to hit songs from The West. In the late 70s, the cards were replaced by cassette technology. The designs on the front of Sound Postcards ranged from the primitive and weird, to the very beautiful.

Designer Rui Silva and Unsound director Mat Schulz have collected hundreds of cards, to curate an exhibition, which has previously appeared in Krakow and London. This exhibtion not only reveals the forgotten artistic merit of thes cards, but allows the public to listen to songs on the cards transferred into mp3 format, drawing attention to the way that sound recording technology changes across time.”